Chapter 5: The Lobby

The lobby had gone so quiet that I could hear the coffee machine hiss behind the security desk.

Jared stayed on his knee with the roses held up.

"I was a coward," he said. "I let Whit and her friends talk me into a joke at your expense."

"You told eighty people I was a closed door."

"I was drunk. I didn't mean it."

"You were on your second sip of champagne."

A security guard coughed into his fist.

Somebody by the elevators had lifted a phone, and I felt a dozen more rise behind it.

Five months ago I would have cried here.

I would have taken the roses to make it stop and hated myself by lunch.

I looked down at him on the marble in his four-hundred-dollar suit, and all I felt was tired.

"Get up, Jared."

"Not until you hear me. Break it off with Merrow. I'll call off the wedding."

He said it loudly enough that the whole lobby could hear.

A sound moved through the crowd, half gasp and half delight.

I understood then that he'd rehearsed it.

He wanted a witness to his sacrifice, and a story to tell afterward about how I turned him down.

"You'd call off your wedding," I said.

"For you. Yes."

"After you left me for her, you'd leave her for me, in a lobby, with cameras."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Sex Lessons with My Worst Enemy from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.